Software defined networks (SDNs) and Internet of things (IoT) networks are maturing and transforming with respect to scale and geographical-distribution (geo-distribution). Practical deployments, which should include integration with existing and legacy networks, need to accompany such transformations. SDN and IoT networks are centralized and use one-to-one client-server connections to communicate. As a result, event streaming and intelligent processing of streaming data across data plane, control plan, and management is cumbersome for these centralized controlling applications. An event is an identifiable occurrence that is recognized by system hardware or software. An event can represent a message, token, count, pattern, or a value that can be detected within an ongoing stream of monitored inputs such as network traffic or other inputs. In addition, using dedicated connections for leadership election and data synchronization for event streaming can cause consistency and synchronization issues in a geo-distributed deployment.
Current solutions, like Open Network Operating System (ONOS)/ OpenDaylight (ODL), are inefficient as they waste compute/infra processing resources in event processing. Subsequently, SDN and IoT applications face challenges for geo-distribution, scaling, and efficiency in event stream processing across control, data, operations, and management.